By Carl Zebrowski
Editor 

“To understand Israel, you have to understand the Middle East,” Eric Lightman, executive director of the JCC, told the gathering in the JCC Kline Auditorium on October 30. The audience of mostly young adults from the community had come to hear Middle East expert Avi Melamed’s presentation “What No One Tells You about Israel and the Middle East,” sponsored by the JCC and the Jewish Federation.

Melamed, a former Israeli intelligence officer, book author on Middle East geopolitical strategy, and Fellow of Intelligence and Middle East Affairs for the Eisenhower Institute, boiled the history of the Middle East most relevant to the post-10/7 world down to an engaging and informative hour. He covered the history of Israel and Palestine in a brief timeline and then moved on to the four decades leading up to the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, October 7 itself, what has happened since, and what could happen next.

"Especially now, with Israel at war and antisemitism on the rise,” said Lee Solomon, the Federation’s director of community engagement, “it was important for us to host an evening for our NextGen cohort (ages 30-45) to provide them with facts and other information they didn’t necessarily learn growing up. They had the opportunity to learn more about Israel and the Middle East and leave with a better understanding of the situation there.”

Melamed opened his talk by explaining how the militarist proxies of Iran, including Hamas and Hezbollah (the former Sunni Muslim, believing in government leadership based on merit, and the latter Shiite Muslim, believing in leadership that’s essentially inherited), have been agitating and fighting Israel for four decades with the stated goal of “liberating Palestine”—and read that as “eliminate the State of Israel.”  The underlying plan against Israel, known as Ring of Fire, was for all that aggression and violence eventually to erupt into an all-out war. 

Then came October 7,  Melamed said, and “Hamas is launching the attack under the impression that the time to eliminate Israel has arrived.” For security purposes, Hamas kept its attack plans secret even from its allies, and soon after its allies realized what was happening, it became clear that they were not fully joining in the fight.

In the aftermath of the attacks, Melamed said, Hezbollah, operating in Lebanon, started merely “poking” Israel. The intended chain reaction didn’t progress very far. “All you did,” he said, rhetorically addressing Hamas, “was cause damage and destruction to your brothers in the Gaza Strip.”

More recently, the conflict began to spread and escalate toward a regional war, with Hezbollah targeting Israel more forcefully in the north while other proxies of Iran raised some havoc too. Then Iran itself fired missiles into Israel. “It was not the first time Iran attacked Israel,” Melamed said, alluding to attacks by proxies over the years. “It was the first time Iran attacked Israel from Iranian soil.”

Israel, long accustomed to responding to proxy attacks with restrained counterattacks limited to just the proxies, replied to Iran’s missiles by attacking Iran directly on October 26. “This time the attack is not symbolic,” Melamed said.

For years before this, Hezbollah was positioning itself as a regional power, Melamed said, and “to a large extent it is.” He was hoping that phrasing is now changing to past tense, helped along by Israel’s strong military responses to both the proxy and the nation that pulls its strings and pays its bills.